IT Staff Convention 2008:Green IT
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Green IT
Moderators:
- Bob Desilets, Information Systems & Computing
- David Toccafondi, Van Pelt Library
Notes: Elizabeth O'Grady, School of Medicine
Introduction:
Talk about the teams’ focus and what we are looking at and what your interests are an audience/group.
IT Eval team for Green IT was formed because the University is focused on Green.
In February 2007, Dr. Amy Gutmann signed the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment.
Commitment toward becoming carbon neutral.
How can we reduce the carbon footprint?
Energy usage
- Penn is number one on the EPA College & University Green Power Partnership List. Wind-power (purchase 47%)
Reducing electrical usage and how that can help.
- Vampire devices. Unplug the charger = not a big impact on your bill, but across the state, there is an overall impact on the power grid
- Desktop – better practices on how to set up in the first place, for energy saving
- User habits. Is your printer set for duplex printing?
- Data centers and servers. Is virtualization an option? Remove servers from a data center = reduce the UPS,the switches, etc.
What we are doing at this point?
- The eval group is looking for energy efficient hardware.
- Question to the group – what are you looking for? Looking for recommendations?
- Look at link on Energy Draw off of the Green IT Evaluation Page. Data suggests that a desktop even powered off were drawing power. Even the printers plugged in and at sleep produced a draw.
- David: Looking at KW draw units to lend from the library for testing systems. Looking at a lab or a building. May be easier to convince your business admin by looking at the data. Shutting down overnight vs. leaving on.
- One of the considerations for how to do patches – having settings to say “wake on LAN”. That will allow updates to happen, but still have a power saving
- From the audience : greener equipment is more expensive. Challenge to “sell” to Business Admins. Can we get central facilities to reveal budget for electricity?
- David: Metering at the building level.
- Bob: What is the incentive to draw electrical costs down? Older buildings are an allocated cost. If you are unable to meter power, how can you tell if you are being energy efficient. BAs have been attending meetings re: moving in this direction.
- From the audience: System level checks – buy desktops that use lower voltage.
- David: If laptop is plugged in, remove the battery.
Another topic of interest: recycling of hardware
How are you handling end-of-life machines?
- Dell recycling
- Most of the vendors “take back”
- Palm takes back cell phones and chargers
- Penn has a recycling page
- Elemental is a local recycler that does not ship abroad and recycles locally and responsibly
- Donations? Monitoring/asking how they recycle (responsibly?)
- ATR – non-profit that will refurb and provide to people
- Center for Community Partnerships – on campus that work with community groups to do training
[Link to Center for Community Partnerships http://www.upenn.edu/ccp/]
- Put documentation on the provider page
- Link to the power stats
- we WILL move the best practices to the web after the Evaluation Team commences for spring.
- returning ink cartridges to the manufacturer(?)
- good link to a Study by Epson about % of ink that gets recycling
- suggestion from audience: Permatech (sp?) – remanufactured cartridges
- Difference between wax-based printer inks and cartridges? Power considerations between the toner-based printer and wax –based. Concern with small particulates laser printers release – current area of study.
- Phaser type printers have time settings. Can save energy by changing settings on most printers.
- Printer set to shutdown over the weekend – easy to do.
- Emerging Recommendation from Green IT Team: devices plugged in to a single strip and turn off at the end of the day when you leave.
- Most of Penn vendors sources have published sites - Dell Earth, IBM – go with virtualization, Apple has been dinged by Greenpeace but moving in the right direction.
Which point in the life cycle are we?
- Packaging – concerns.
- Write a letter. Knows that people are concerned. And it gets the vendor information back. Computer Connection has the information on site.
- Information from IBM on using less power, but what does that do for your infrastructure? Consider the overall costs. Infrastructure can be 40%.
- Anyone doing anything to re-purpose the heat generated by the data center? In the winter time bringing in the external cold?
- Stanford is constructing a Greener data center at the moment. Modular UPS.
Comments from audience:
- rack server = consolidate into a smaller space total computing power less than using. before
- Companies that retrofit – water cooled system. Chill loop already on campus used for AC.
What are we doing with the packaging?
- Is there a box exchange on campus? Craigslist.org at the moment. (Bob will bring up at IT roundtable)
- Dell has the option to not send the manuals, etc, to reduce the amount sent. Facilities should be recycling.
- Recycled paper. How many people are buying? Yes. Difference in cost—not in the 10-40% category. Ben Financials has lots of Green options. Go into a dept that has recycled – and see no real difference in quality.
- Right now, single –stream paper recycling– send to Blue Mountain IF you can get the office paper singled out, office paper may be a revenue generator.
- Double-sided printing by default.
More comments from the audience:
- Problem from audience on re-using paper. Duplex is the preferred option. Re-using can break the printers.
- Make things easy for the end-user otherwise people will not think about it. Get success in the beginning in order.
- Reducing the amount of equipment for the user? Number of printers? -
- High heat of an IBM Blade center. One of the win of the data center, used combined with virtualization 100 machines on 5 double wides, instead of 100 pizza boxes.
- Less carbon footprint.
- Harder you can run a larger piece versus many smaller pieces – better for environment.
- Set servers to run the CPU at a lower speed unless you need it.
More ideas from the panel:
- High efficiency power supplies are a big deal – Energy Star 4.0.
- A lot of the settings don’t come out of the box that way. Recommendation for the different operating systems will be published.
- Extending life cycles with current machines.
From the audience:
- Hard to “sell” more expensive Green solutions to research individuals that are purchasing on a grant.
- Bob: Some situations are not necessary to go green.
- Some departments like to keep servers local. Make sense to move servers to a larger data center.
- What about virtualization? Are you looking at virtualizing any of the servers on campus?
- Some in SAS computing. Growing pains. Delay in the reacting. Not quite the same as using your own machine.
- Red Hat Linux other school
- What applications are you using?
- VMwear SX 3.5. Linux installed on the bare metal.
- Using Zen >25 machines. “If you are doing power virtualization, get the right machines for power management."
- From the audience: Is there a method of putting what we are doing in a public arena? Putting it in a public space, writing a blog?
- Formal sustainability hire at Penn: Daniel Garofalo (architech)
- Penn Design - “shame on design”. A place for education
Idea of real numbers?
- Spending 7 cents/kwh . 23 million dollars this year alone.
- Rate caps come off in 2010 – spending will increase 30%. Get power metered at a smaller level?
- Green IT Eval Team is still running through the end of May.
[Link to the Green IT Eval Team Page http://www.upenn.edu/computing/eval/2008/greenit/]
Any additional questions?
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